PH wants Australia as 3rd strategic partner

By Willard Cheng, ABS-CBN News

MANILA, Philippines - The Philippines wants Australia to become its third strategic partner after the United States and Japan.

“We're offering Australia actually a strategic partnership. We only have two strategic partnerships—one in the United States of America and the other with Japan. We're offering the third to Australia and they are presently studying it,” he said ahead of his state visit to Australia next week.

Australia has been helping the Philippines in its Coast Watch System with their military conducting training with Filipino security forces.

“We share the same values, we're both democracies. We have been normally on the same side of issues that have confronted our respective peoples since at least World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. We face the same challenges be it terrorism, global climate change, relationships with the superpower in the neighborhood,” Aquino said.

“So all of these lend to shared values, in a sense, shared background and therefore it promotes closer cooperation between our peoples.”